Tag: Geology

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Magnificent manganese and the search for cobalt | CoG3 Consortium

At the start of a major new project involving collaboration between 8 institutions from across the UK, Rachel Norman of the Museum’s Economic and Environmental Earth Sciences division introduces us to one of the new ways the CoG3 team are unearthing cobalt, a metal of great strategic and economic importance.

On Wednesday 27 January, Museum and University of Southampton scientists searched in the Museum collections for manganese nodules.

Photo showing the specimen resting on the desk
A manganese nodule growing around a shark’s tooth. This sample was actually collected by HMS Challenger in 1875.

Manganese nodules form in very deep water on the seafloor, at the sediment-water interface, and cover vast areas. They form by the precipitation of manganese minerals out of seawater over extremely long time scales. Manganese nodules grow at a rate of just ~2 mm per million years, making them one of the slowest geological processes that we know of. This means that if a nodule reaches a radius of 50 mm, it could be 25 million years old!

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Latest edition of evolve out now | Library and Archives

Hot off the press is the autumn 2015 edition of the Museum Members’ magazine evolve and for those who love the Museum’s paper collections there is plenty to read about.

Image of the front cover showing a photo from the latest Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
The cover of the latest edition of evolve

Natural Histories and the mandrake

The Natural Histories collaboration between the Museum and BBC Radio 4 over the last few months included the story of nightshade plant family and in particular the role of the mandrake in early medicine and its depiction in in botanical herbal illustrations such as those held in our collections.

New Bauer Brothers art exhibition in our Images of Nature Gallery and accompanying publication

Special Collections Librarian Paul Cooper introduces our exhibition of the botanical and zoological artwork of Franz and Ferdinand Bauer. The exhibition opened on 7 November 2015 and runs until 2017. All of the artwork by the brothers on display during this period comes from the collections of the Museum Library.

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Mapping the Earth: the bicentennial of the William Smith map | Shop at the Museum

A great icon of British geology is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. The William Smith map or ‘A Delination of the strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland’ brought revolutionary change to the way we think about the structure of the Earth and vastly advanced the science of geology.

As the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival (1-3 May) approaches, where this giant of geology will be celebrated, the Museum’s online shop takes a closer look at the man behind the map and what inspired him.

200 years old in 2015, the William Smith map changed the face of geology
200 years old in 2015, the William Smith map changed the face of geology

Who was William Smith?

Born in the Oxfordshire hamlet of Churchill in 1769, William Smith was the son of a blacksmith. Even though he did well at school there was never any thought of him attending university due to his family’s poverty.

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